Moneyfest.
A money-tracking app for Filipinos who want to actually see where their money goes. Co-founded with my partner from a shared obsession with our own spreadsheets — designed end-to-end, peaked at Top 8 in the App Store PH Finance category.
Role
Co-founder · Designer
Scope
Brand · Product · Marketing
Status
Growing
Timeline
2023
01 · Context
Built from our own spreadsheet.
My partner and I were obsessed. Every peso tracked in shared Google Sheets, every category color-coded, every weekend recap going over what came in and what went out. Existing PH money apps all felt the same — heavy gradients, ads everywhere, foreign-looking categories, and pushing you toward products instead of helping you understand your own money. So we built the one we actually wanted to use.
Free to use, no ads, no upsells. Built for how Filipinos actually manage money — peso-first, GCash and Maya as defaults, plain-Tagalog-friendly categories, friend-shared budgets. As co-founder and lead designer, I owned the brand, the product end-to-end, and every marketing creative since launch.
Top 8
App Store PH, Finance category
80K+
downloads since launch
4.7
average user rating
02 · Process
How we got there.
- 01
Define
Co-founders aligned on a single user: a 25-year-old Filipino professional, first real paycheck, no language for money. We wrote the audience as a person, not a persona.
- 02
Identity
Built the brand from name to logo to voice in three weeks. Goal: feel less like a bank and more like a friend who happens to be good with money.
- 03
Product
Wireframed the core flows in Figma — onboarding, dashboard, transactions, goals. Tested with 12 friends across two cities. Cut three features in week two.
- 04
Launch
App Store + Play Store rollout, paired with a 6-week content sprint across TikTok and Instagram. Hit top-10 in Finance within the first quarter.
03 · Brand Identity
A friendly money brand.
A working snapshot of the visual system we use across the app and marketing — extracted from the build, not a formal brand book. Treat this as a designer's reference rather than client-facing guidelines.
Logo
moneyfest
PRIMARY LOCKUP
WORDMARK
SYMBOL
Color
Primary Teal
#1FC8A0
Soft Teal
#A3E8D7
Surface
#F8F4ED
Black
#0E0E0E
Blue
#1E90FF
Pink
#FBC8C8
Yellow
#F6D374
Purple
#8C7CFF
Red
#E84B4B
Teal does the brand work; everything else is contextual. Category colors (pink/yellow/purple/blue) come in via budget categories, account-card backgrounds, and chart segments — never as primary brand surfaces.
Typography
Nunito
Sole typeface across product and marketing.
Black weight for currency values and primary numerical UI. Bold for section titles and labels. Regular for body, helper text, and microcopy. We don't use anything between Regular and Bold — the contrast is the point.
Principles
- 01
Soft, not corporate.
Round corners, warm cream surfaces, generous whitespace. The app should feel like an organized notebook, not a bank app.
- 02
Money in plain words.
No jargon, no "AUM" or "NAV" or "ROI." Just balances, budgets, what came in, what went out.
- 03
Emoji as iconography.
Apple emoji as category markers — instantly readable, no custom icon library to maintain. Personality without losing speed.
04 · Key Screens
The product, screen by screen.
Home
Wallets at a glance, budget rings at the top, recent transactions below. The whole financial day on one screen.
Wallets
All accounts side by side — each in its bank's own color. Drag to reorder, hide what you don't want to see today.
Statistics
Cashflow at a glance. Filter by account, toggle income vs expense, see where the month actually went.
Transactions
Every peso, grouped by day. Auto-categorized with emoji, editable in two taps, nothing scary in red.
05 · Marketing Creative
From product to feed.
Selected statics, GIF stills, and TikTok thumbnails from the launch and growth campaigns. The brand stays consistent — the format flexes from feed (1:1) to story (4:5) to vertical video (9:16).
Featured carousel · 7 slides
Long-form carousel post — scroll right to view all slides.
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Featured carousel · 6 slides
Long-form carousel post — scroll right to view all slides.
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New Year's Resolution
Switch to Moneyfest
Tutorial Part 1
Tutorial Part 2
Budget Challenge
Showcase video · 16:9
App walkthrough — the full Moneyfest experience in one cut.
06 · A Design Decision
“Why is everything in dollars? Why doesn't GCash count? Why are the categories things I've never bought?”
Every Filipino we showed early versions to said the same things. Foreign money apps assume USD, ignore e-wallets, and offer categories like “Uber” or “Whole Foods.” We rebuilt every default for here: ₱ as the symbol everywhere, GCash and Maya as setup defaults right next to BPI and BDO, categories like “Pamilya,” “Bills,” “Jeep/Grab,” and “Coffee” — written the way our friends actually talk about spending. The app stopped feeling foreign on the second screen.
07 · Reflections
What I learned along the way.
Designing for who you are.
Building something for Filipinos specifically — not a generic app translated for the market — was the entire competitive advantage. The closer the design felt to "this was made for me," the faster people stayed.
A founder TikTok beats a paid ad.
A TikTok telling our story — two Filipinos who got obsessed with their own spreadsheet and built it into an app — reached far more people than any ad would have. Most of our early users came from that one video. Story-first distribution, every time.
Financial literacy is a design problem.
Most Filipinos aren't un-financially-literate — they're intimidated by tools that don't speak their language. Making money tracking feel like a notebook, not a banking interface, lowered the bar enough that people actually showed up. Hitting Top 8 in App Store PH Finance — competing with GCash, Maya, BPI — said the bar was the right thing to lower.
Next case study
Goodboy Gravies.
A starter-kit landing page where the brief said "clone the competitor" — and the work became "redesign the brand."